Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/373

Rh how to live better, and thus increase their efficiency and insure their status as self-supporting, independent members of society. The Negroes themselves are working to accomplish this end in practically every institution maintained by them throughout the south. This view of the Negro problem, practical in the extreme, is the one generally held at present in the south. The ideal seems to be to force the Negro to earn a better place in society and political life by the sweat of his brow and the toil of his hands; which toil, it is confidently hoped, will be guided by a constantly increasing intelligence, itself the indirect fruit of his labor.

On the other hand, outside the south the Negro problem is generally viewed as not primarily an economic, but as a political and "social rights" problem. The aim of many, if not most, of those living outside the south who take an active interest in the Negro is to secure for him fuller political rights and wider social opportunities, believing that as restrictions are removed, the Negro's position will improve in every respect, and he will ultimately take his place side by side with the whites, on an equal footing and possessing an identical cultural equipment.

Whatever be the theoretical merit of these views, whatever be the results of their trial, whatever be the advantage of one over the other ethically, it can easily be seen that although they advocate almost exactly opposite methods, those who advocate them are striving to reach the same goal. Each group is attempting to help the Negro to attain a more complete civilization; and each is attempting to do this by trying to make the Negro absorb the white man's civilization and come into complete accord with the profound moving-springs of the white man's social sanctions.

Many writers have contributed to the elaboration of these prevailing views of the problem. Admittedly, all of them have as their ideal the creation through evolutionary processes of a state in which the whites and the Negroes live side by side, each group partaking of the same civilization on a basis of ethical equality, and each playing its part in government and society according to its ability. This bi-racial state, theoretically, should have a single civilization, common to and understood similarly by both peoples; this civilization—and here is the vital point—will be the civilization of the whites, which, it is assumed, will be inculcated into the Negroes and which the Negroes will absorb without sufficiently modifying it to impair its usefulness as a foundation for a complex, though organically homogeneous, society.

Underlying the conception of a state such as has just been described lies a more fundamental conception which is seldom formulated, but upon which the whole structure of theory about southern race problems is based. This conception may be stated in various ways; its boldest, most general, and most erroneous form is the hypothesis that "all men are equal"; a more moderate form is "equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none"; but the most comprehensive form, which contains